Hu Tongtong grins into the camera lens before tucking into a gargantuan feast. In one sitting, she eats 93 eggs, 200 dumplings, 76 egg tarts, 5kg of hamburgers and 48 lamb kebabs.
Weighing in at 43.5kg, the lithe blogger – also known as “big stomach” – undertakes regular eating challenges online on the broadcaster Weibo, a popular social media platform in China with 500 million users.
The most famous binge-eating blogger is Mimi Zhang, who has over seven million fans on her Weibo page and regularly hits the top trending lists on Chinese social media. Zhang became famous for a 2016 eating challenge in which she consumed 8lb (4kg) of rice in one sitting and she has since become one of China’s most successful “eating broadcasting” hosts, attracting millions of fans worldwide.
Both TongTong and Zhang are among the growing number of binge-eating bloggers who specialise in the online video trend known as “mukbang”. Originating in Korea, it loosely translates as “eating broadcast”. It is a genre that combines a simulated dinner with friends and the shock appeal of competitive eating.
The popularity of the binge-eating craze has prompted the Chinese government to pass a law to tackle food waste. President Xi Jinping has called this wasteful bingeing a “distressing problem” and said that filming or sharing videos of mukbang is prohibited and that bloggers could face a hefty fine of up to $15,300 if they continued to post videos.
Yet the crackdown isn’t just about waste. China has an obesity problem, and its leaders are worried: more than half of the country’s adult population are overweight or obese.
A damning government report released in December looked at a group of 600,000 Chinese residents between 2015 and 2019 and found that 34.3 per cent of adults were overweight and 16.4 per cent were obese. By comparison, in 2012, the figures were 30 per cent and 11.9 per cent.
In his book, Fat China: How Expanding Waistlines Are Changing a Nation, Paul French notes that in 1982 just 7 per cent of China’s population were overweight compared to 25 per cent in the US.
It’s also a huge and growing public health issue. Benjamin Shobert, a senior associate for international health at the National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR), says: “Increased spending on long-term management of chronic disease is a common challenge in other developed countries”.
But in China, he says, the problem has the potential to be particularly severe given the country continues to suffer from a lack of community health and primary care providers – which leads to patients seeking care only when they are quite ill.
Shobert adds: “In the case of polychronic disease patients [someone with diabetes or heart disease] in particular, presenting late in their disease progression increases the cost of care, and also frequently leads to poor health outcomes.”
Being overweight or obese are established risk factors for cardiovascular diseases, type-2 diabetes, coronary health disease, and cancer. Obesity is also a big indicator of the severity of coronavirus symptoms.
What is so extraordinary is that within a few decades, China has gone from a country plagued by malnutrition to one faced with an escalating threat from binge-eating, overweight citizens.
Since 1954, economic growth and trade liberalisation has transformed China from a nation where famine was once widespread to one of the largest economies in the world. While millions have been lifted out of poverty, the country’s economic success has brought with it a rise in sedentary office and service work, and increased availability of affordable, unhealthy foods with high energy content but low nutritional value.
Erik Hemmingsson, a researcher at GIH in Stockholm, explains: “There are many factors behind the increase in obesity rates, but the main explanation is the exceptionally rapid transition from a more traditional agrarian society to a more Western society.
“This includes changes in disposable income, meaning people can buy more processed foods and labour-saving devices.”
This “nutrition transition” from traditional fare to ultra-processed Western junk food has unquestionably played a big part in the rise of obesity in China.
Fast-food chains like KFC and McDonalds now line street corners in Chinese cities. KFC arrived in the country in 1987 and soon kick-started a fast food industry that would generate $177.6 billion in 2019. It now has over 6,600 outlets. Yum! Restaurants, Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, and Burger King also have thousands of outlets and have plans to expand.
While the grandparents of China’s millennials would have lived off a traditional plant-based diet with coarse cereals and vegetables, their grandchildren have transitioned to this western-style diet with increased consumption of refined grains and highly-processed, high-sugar and high-fat foods.
According to the latest national data, 19 per cent of children aged between 6 and 17 are overweight or obese. Many of these overweight children are shipped off to “fat farms” or “chubby camps” where they undergo a strict dietary and physical regime to shed pounds during the school holidays. These children are a product of the now-reversed one-child policy, so it’s perhaps no not surprising, given the deprivations their parents and grandparents faced, that they are overindulged with KFC buckets and gallons of sugary-sweet Coca-Cola.
Linked to this is the role food plays as a social signal in China: eating certain types of food in large quantities is a sign of wealth.
Obesity is a far greater issue in urban areas. Shobert says: “The cities are where all these factors: urbanisation, social signalling, and changes in workforce come together. In the more rural parts of China, patterns in diet and the work day remain similar to what they were several decades ago.”
Shobert calls it the perfect storm: economic prosperity, an increasingly westernised and urban society, social signalling and a change in calorific intake compounded by a sedentary lifestyle have all led to obesity. Increased automation and use of transport haven’t helped: fewer than a quarter of the adult population exercise at least once a week.
Beijing’s mandarins have spotted the danger. The government’s flagship programme, ‘Healthy China 2030’, introduces health education into the school curriculum with the aim of increasing life expectancy by four years – to 79 – and eventually meeting the health standards of high-income economies in North America and Western Europe.
Yet some believe ‘Healthy China’ will not go far enough in preventing obesity and nutrition-related diseases.
Prof Limin Wang and his colleagues in a recently published report on China’s obesity crisis in The Lancet, say: “The insufficient policy attention and support to tackle the wider determinants of obesity might have hampered progress in obesity control.”
“Some potentially effective policy mechanisms implemented in other countries to tackle obesity include restrictions on the marketing of unhealthy foods to children, nutritional food labelling, and taxes for sugar-sweetened beverages.”
Hemmingsson believes the best way to prevent this escalation is to stop the “blame-the-individual narrative.” He says that the fuelling of negative stereotypes, such as people with obesity being lazy, stupid and lacking in character, is not helpful.
“If governments are serious about prevention, they need to focus on the macro, i.e. the overlying causes such as changes in diet and lifestyle, but also social factors and stress.”
At the same time, Shobert wants to see more focus on consumer education, government regulation to require disclosure of recommended food intake by manufacturers and food companies, and in some cases, targeted taxes designed to discourage consumption of said food types to help fight China’s growing problem. And take the weight off the shoulders of the already creaking healthcare system.
